In the November issue of Esquire (Halle Berry cover) is an article by A.J. Jacobs titled “Rationality Project.” It’s all about rational thinking and the writer’s quest to live and think more rationally. In short, your brain is easily fooled, or rather goaded into a systematic way of thinking that makes it easier to process thoughts/ideas/behaviors that are not necessarily rational i.e. make sense. This is the same writer who wrote the book A Year of Living Biblically where he tried to follow all the rules of the Bible to the letter. It’s great.
In this article A.J. writes about the time his wife was reading a New York Times article about the recent salmonella tomato scare (I was like, whatever. I ate tomatoes) The article stated that 800 people had gotten sick from salmonella, “possibly from tainted tomatoes.” Possibly. He took the paper from his wife and scribbled: “Meanwhile millions of people ate tomatoes and did NOT get sick. But thousands did die from obesity.” Yet which are people more scared of?
Another experiment was based on eating rationally. When do we know when enough is enough? The assumption, a true one, is that people eat what’s in front of them without thinking much about whether they’re full or not. We’ve confused portions so badly that we don’t even know what’s an acceptable amount of intake for our body’s nutrition. In an attempt to trick his brain and find out what exactly a reasonable amount of food is, A.J. placed a napkin over his cereal bowl in the morning and tried to eat until his stomach deemed itself full. I saw a Discovery Channel special that tried something similar. In one test, they gave children two different sets of food, one with a bigger portion and one with a normal portion. The children ate both plates without fail. Moral: it’s better to give your children a healthy portion instead of more—they won’t know the difference. They eat what’s in front of them. A.J. writes:
“People often choose the medium size at a restaurant even if the small would suffice—we have a fear of the extremes, so we go with the middle option. We find it logical to eat cows but not other animals like dogs or mice. Studies have found we find things tastier if we pay more for them. Or if we eat them out of fancier containers. Later in the day I eat microwaved chili out of our wedding plates. It’s delicious.”
If Fruit Loops and its generic stepcousin Fruit Circles (yes, it exists) taste fundamentally the same but the latter is cheaper, then why do we buy Fruit Loops?
“Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness. Psychologists call it the Mere Exposure Effect. The basic idea is, I like Crest because I’m accustomed to Crest.”
Another thing the author tries to fix is some of his irrational superstitions. One is his need to swallow (pause) twice.
“Superstitions, I learn, stem from the Confirmation Bias. The faulty reasoning goes like this: I’ve swallowed in pairs for fifteen years, and I’m alive and relatively okay. If I stop swallowing in pairs, who knows what will happen? So I’ll keep on swallowing in pairs. Highly irrational.”
Iit’s difficult to change any of these things–they’re instinctive–but we can be aware of how our brains operate and maybe tweak a thing or two. I won’t retype the whole article but it’s interesting. Hit up B&N.
